EDITOR’S LETTER
Not that I want to come over all Captain Complacency but I’m happy to tell you that, contrary to reports pretty much everywhere, the sky is not falling in. You’ll remember the story. Chicken Little — a free-range hen, not that it does her much good — is hit on the head by a falling acorn, or nut. (Not a nut-job, a nut.) Panicked into an apocalyptic hysteria she speed-waddles about the farmyard recruiting all the other birds into her fantasy of imminent catastrophe. They flap themselves into such a feathery frenzy that they forget themselves entirely and are eaten by a fox.
The reason it resonates is that throughout history there have been moments when it seemed that things had got so bad that the world was about to end, in a gigantic fireball or some-such cinematic meltdown. Actually, it’s not so much that there have been moments like that, it’s more that there always has been and always will be a constant background buzz of anxiety and paranoia, and occasionally some appalling development causes the buzz to escalate to a deafening red-alert roar. If you are concerned that social media and the 24-hour news cycle have not helped calm this tendency, you may be on to something.
I’m not going to tell you that horrifying, evil events have not occurred lately, nor that they won’t continue to occur. (No, Brexit does not count.) For some people these evil events really are the end of the world, or the end of their worlds, which might be said to be the same thing. The rest of us will keep buggering on.
Esquire is intended as a sometimes civilised, often silly, always stylish refuge from the doom and the gloom, a place to escape, for a moment, the barbarism of the real world. But occasionally a real-world story is too outrageous to resist. Donald Trump’s election campaign is one of those. The fact that the tacky, blowhard New York real estate guy once derided, in the pages of Spy magazine, as “the short-fingered vulgarian” is now fighting Hillary Clinton for the leader of the free world gig: it’s just too phantasmagoric, too hallucinatory, too blindingly awful for us not to want a piece of it. The fact that he’s a racist, sexist, mendacious ignoramus is not funny. Demagoguery is not funny. But it’s a hell of a story. With that in mind, we sent Sanjiv Bhattacharya to Cleveland, Ohio, to witness Trump’s coronation as the official Republican Party nominee for President of the USA. And to meet the people who had gathered to celebrate and remonstrate. Meanwhile, Dan Davies went to Turnberry, in Scotland, on that fateful Brexit morning, to see Trump break off from campaigning for a day to open a golf club. In the words of Richard Littlejohn (a potential Trumper?), you couldn’t make it up. Nor would you wish to. And, what’s more, you don’t have to.
As the staff of Esquire will confirm, I plan each issue with painstaking care, months in advance, holding each word, each photo up to the light and inspecting it for flaws, and only after the most agonised consideration do I press “print”. Never, ever have I waited until the last moment and then chucked a load of random stuff from my inbox at the sub-editors and the designers and said, “Come on, you lot, make a magazine out of this!”
So when it was pointed out to me, fairly late in the process I must say, that this month we have two big features pegged to two new works, one a novel, the other a TV show, both of which are concerned with the election of a new Pope, I was able to say, with full confidence: “Yes! I know that. It’s a Papal Special Issue, obviously! Can’t you see that?” And then tiptoe back to my office and quietly shut the door.
The novel is Conclave, by Robert Harris. In Richard T Kelly’s conversation with Harris, the master of the literary thriller says that a writer should know the ending of his book before he starts it. Perhaps a magazine editor could take a hint from that.
The TV show is The Young Pope, in which Jude Law plays Pius XIII. Before I met Law to talk about that, among other things, I watched the first two episodes. And I’m keen to see the rest. Which tells you a lot, because usually I get distracted after a few minutes and start checking my bad news feeds for the latest political turbulence, celebrity car crash or obscene football transfer.
Possibly not as scary as Trump or the Vatican but fairly terrifying to me, Johnny Davis’s story on virtual reality posits a situation just round the corner in which we sit at home with our loved ones — or, at least, alongside our loved ones — with our nerd helmets on, each of us immersed in a private virtual world so lifelike it makes actual existence seem utterly zzzzz. (Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense: any “virtual reality” that came even close to the real thing would involve putting on a headset that gave one the illusion of sitting at a desk all day staring at a screen before heading home to an evening of… sitting on a sofa staring at a screen.) Whatever your attitude to VR, Johnny’s piece offers a fascinating glimpse of a game-changing technology.
More up my own alley: Tim Lewis profiles the Hart brothers, among Britain’s best restaurateurs. What they offer is something technology can’t, at least until VR can supply smells and tastes, and convivial company. Unless the world ends tomorrow, their new place, El Pastor, will be the hottest opening of the year. I’ll be in the queue.
The fact that Donald Trump is a racist, sexist, mendacious ignoramus
is not funny. Demagoguery is not funny. But it’s a hell of a story